Citizen Dave: The Week in Review, with socialist Hostess, the Big Ten on the East Coast, and victorious deer

Hostess is flirting with oblivion. I'm sure it has already occurred to you that this pulls in two directions with regard to communism.

On the one hand, it means that we could all starve after surviving nuclear war with the Russians, or maybe the Chinese. Millions of us had counted on the indestructibility of Twinkies and Ho Hos to make it through the decades of bleakness in our fallout shelters. Without Hostess products, life won't be worth living underground. (Yeah, yeah, I know. quibblers will say that Russia isn't really a communist state anymore and that "communist" China has now embraced free market capitalism big time. It's all a ruse to make us let down our guard and stop spending on the military as if the Cold War was still freezing.)

On the other hand, having grown up with Hostess cupcakes and Twinkies, I know that they bred socialism. Did you ever notice that most Hostess products come in pairs? In my family, it was taboo to eat both Twinkies or both cupcakes at once. The unspoken rule was that you needed to wrap up the other one and leave it in the bread bin for at least twenty-four hours so that your siblings would have a fair chance. Technically speaking, after a day it was fair game and, being a Hostess product, it would be as fresh as ever. But no Twinkie ever survived long enough to be tested.

Anyway, Hostess cleverly mandated sharing among America's impressionable youngsters and you know what that leads to. That's right. Pretty soon you're one of the 47% of us who are takers and not makers. Same goes for Popsicles. I once saw a kid eat both sides of a grape Popsicle. I was appalled. He became a Republican.

In business news, the Big Ten added two major media markets (and also football teams, I guess) to the league. The Maryland Terrapins and Rutgers (whose sports teams are nicknamed the Old Queens) are joining the Big Ten. A Terrapin is a turtle and an Old Queen conjures up things that don't immediately make you think of fierce, in-the-trenches pigskin matchups.

The Big Ten has always been about hardy Midwestern types running up the middle and playing lots of defense. Teams had the names of distempered nocturnal mammals, not turtles, for cryin' out loud. Anyway, with the new teams likely coming into the Badgers' division (Leaders, Legends, Deities, Demigods, I can never remember which one we're in) we'll get to play Maryland and Rutgers every year and Michigan and Iowa once in a blue moon. But people in New Jersey and the DC suburbs might tune in to watch their teams get crushed by our guys, so I guess maybe it's worth it after all.

In state news, Governor Scott Walker's office announced that it would not be arresting federal officials who are implementing the Affordable Health Care Act despite the urgings of nine Republican lawmakers to do just that. Then he made up for this act of sanity by turning down the chance to implement health exchanges under the new law at the state level. Radical leftist groups like the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce and the Wisconsin Hospital Association had supported a state exchange while several tea party groups opposed it.

Here's an idea: let's arrest the nine Republicans on charges of being ineligible to serve because they live on another planet.

Finally, for the second year in a row, I did not shoot a deer despite four days in the woods with cervidcide on my mind. All I got out of it was four days of solitude, quiet enough to read a couple of good books, time with good friends at deer camp, some darn good meals, and a cocktail or two. Of course, like any red-blooded Wisconsin deer hunter who believes in individual freedom and getting the government out of my life, I blame the state Department of Natural Resources. I don't want the government providing me with health care, but by God, they owe me some deer!